For over a year, Eve Lazarus has spent every day with John F.C.B. Vance. The forensic scientist solved some of Vancouver’s most infamous crimes, was known around the world as the “Sherlock Holmes of Canada”, and then was all but forgotten by history.  

They met by chance, over a cold case that the Australian-born, Vancouver-basedwriter was researching for her 2015 book Cold Case Vancouver. In fact, it was a murder that took place just around the corner from Lonsdale Quay Market in North Vancouver, where she sat down with the Georgia Straight to discuss her new book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear, a work that delves into Vance’s story, and the turbulent time in Vancouver’s history he was working in.

“There was a murder of a girl, just here, weirdly enough,” Lazarus said, gesturing over her shoulder at a side street just a minute’s walk away.

“She was a war worker in 1934, meeting her family in West Van and she needed to catch the bus. She missed it by a minute and started walking. Somewhere along the road she got picked up and murdered.”

As Lazarus looked further into Jennie Conroy’s story, she came across Insp. Vance’s name as a forensic investigator on the case. Intrigued by the thought that a forensic scientist would be so involved in an investigation in the 1930s, she dug deeper and found more records of Vance’s work with the police—on toxicology, serology (examination of blood serum), and other areas that were virtually unexplored at a time when there was only one police department in Canada with a forensic scientist on staff: Vancouver.

“To put it in perspective, forensics is in its infancy, there’s nothing around,” said Lazarus. “Montreal had the only forensics department in North America. Toronto didn’t get a forensics unit until 1932. He was it. So that was just too good. I had a book.”

Lazarus, who had already penned five books about B.C.’s history, knew she wanted to learn more about Vance. He started in 1907 as Vancouver’s city analyst, testing food and water supplies, before being called in to investigate crime scenes, and being made honorary inspector on the police force. But she was curious about why his name is now virtually unknown, despite having been a local celebrity when, at one time, his courtroom testimony turned the tide on a number of the city’s most sensationalized trials.

Originally, Lazarus’s vision for the book was a series of crimes that showed Vancouver at a time of social and political upheaval. Vance was to be a recurring character, and his involvement in the cases would be the thread that tied the narrative together.

But then the author got lucky and met Vance’s family. After she begged them to look around for any of the inspector’s personal notes, they uncovered a box of crime-scene photos, notes, and forensic samples that had been buried in a relative’s basement for decades.

“His family had no idea. I think they thought it was a box of shoes or something,“ said Lazarus.

The discovery changed everything about the project, with the samples offering up “research gold, like winning the lottery”.

“In some cases, like Jennie Conroy, he’d taken the envelope with all the forensic samples and I’d have a hair spilling out on my desk,” says Lazarus. “He had saved gravel samples from the crime scene and photos of her from the autopsy room, so I could follow through and see when a case was important to him, enough to take home.”

This wealth of material certainly made the author’s work easier, and it shows in the finished product. The book is illustrated throughout with handwritten notes by Vance, so the reader can get to know him on a more personal level.

But when writing the book, Lazarus still made an effort to reflect the social factors that were driving forces behind the crimes Vance investigated.

“To me, it’s really important that these murders and people are put into historical context,”she said.  

“That period from 1900 to 1950 was this hotbed of political corruption. People think of Vancouver as kind of bland, but it’s really violent and colourful and interesting. It was a very violent, racist, turbulent time and I wanted that in the background.”

Blood, Sweat, and Fear touches on many of the historical and cultural phenomena that were in play in Vancouver during the early 20^th century. The stories reflect on anti-Asian racism, domestic violence, corruption in the police force, indigenous-settler relations, displaced soldiers returning from the war, and homophobia in a time when homosexuality was illegal. Lazarus said she had to fight with her editor to keep in a section about gangs recruiting children as young as 13 to rob banks.

In the process of unpacking all these complicated issues, Lazarus consulted with lawyers to help contextualize the history, and connected with a retired forensic scientist in Toronto named Doug Lucas, who explained and fact-checked the science of her early drafts.

From her methods, Lazarus and Vance seem to share a quest for fairness, and to uncover the victims’ truth. While Vance’s testimony put many people in jail or sent them to the gallows, there were many instances when his expertise helped an innocent person walk free, or face a less severe sentence. He made so many enemies during his time on the expert-witness stand that there were seven attempts on his life in 1934—a year that is vividly depicted in the book, thanks to his personal note-taking.

As with any good crime story, the life of John Vance isn’t without a few loose ends. Despite the personal and archived materials that helped bring this forgotten crime fighter back to life, Lazarus still had many questions for him that couldn’t be answered.

“If I had Vance there and could ask him the stuff, that would be so much easier,” she said. “’Who gave you that job? Where did you go next?’ There was a school of criminology that opened in Washington state in the 1920s, and I’ve got to think he had something to do with that, but I couldn’t connect the dots, so I couldn’t put that in.”

All lingering questions aside, Lazarus is set to launch the book this Thursday (June 8) at the Vancouver Police Museum. The event will include a bar set up in the old autopsy room, and a tour of Vance’s old lab.

Now at the end of their time together, Lazarus has returned Vance’s materials to his family. They’re planning to donate the collection to the police museum, which, according to the author, “is where they should be.”

But after such a long time, it was hard for the writer to say goodbye to the man who worked so hard to keep Vancouver safe.

“I fell totally in love with him,” said Lazarus. “I was obsessed with him for over a year, seven days a week. I went through a kind of post-partum depression when I finished, like, ‘Oh my God, what will I do now without Vance in my life every day?’”

She laughed. “But I’m over it now.”

If her body of work is any indication, in true John Vance style, she’ll soon find another buried story from Vancouver’s murky history of crime to investigate.